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May 23, 2023

Microsoft Build: May 23-25

Event Overview

Microsoft Power Platform will be featured prominently at Microsoft Build – Microsoft’s flagship developer event kicking off on May 23. Microsoft will be landing key news through a set of executive-delivered keynotes as well as breakout sessions, discussion opportunities, demonstrations, hands-on labs and expert meet ups. 

 

The list of announcements and disclosures below highlights Microsoft’s competitive differentiation and market momentum across Power Platform—advancements that will allow every organization to innovate with collaborative applications and low code. And if you haven’t already registered, there is still time to register for the event. 

 

Product Announcements

For an overview of the top highlights, review Charles Lamanna’s blog post The future of app development with Power Platform.

 

Power Platform catalog in Managed Environments

To further enhance developer productivity in the Power Platform, Managed Environments now comes with the ability to have a catalog of your enterprise-approved templates and components. Professional developers can publish artifacts such as apps, flows, and bots for their organization to use in their own solutions using the PAC CLI and GitHub actions. With every new component in the catalog, the benefits are cumulative to the entire organization – increasingly reducing time and cost for each new solution.  

 

Power Platform developer hub

The developer hub in Power Platform is a new hub that helps code-first developers quickly learn and onboard to Power Platform. It offers a single starting point to establish a developer environment using videos and guided walk-throughs so a developer can watch the process and then try for themselves to get started building their own apps faster.

 

Power Pages: Copilot in Power Pages (public preview)

Copilot in Power Pages is the latest in Power Platform AI innovation, allowing makers to use natural language input to generate text copy, build business data-centric forms, create web page layouts, activate chatbots, and enable site design themes in seconds for rapid visual setup and customization. Now available for public preview.

 

Instead of spending hours crafting and coding websites, use natural language and intelligent suggestions to speed up your website building process. Start building today with Copilot in Power Pages and help your organization increase productivity and rapidly build websites your customers will love, at-scale, all securely managed on Microsoft Power Platform.

 

Power Virtual Agents: Generative Actions (limited technology preview)

Using the generative actions capability, Power Virtual Agents can automate bot responses with action. Rather than manually building every action for the bot, bot makers can expose their tools to the bot (like tenant APIs, enterprise specific Power Automate Flows or more), which PVA can automatically chain together to produce responses and even ask users for additional information. With the generative actions tracing canvas, builders can monitor the bot's process and question generation.

 

Power Virtual Agents: CLU (Azure Bring your own custom language model) (public preview)

With the public preview of Azure conversational language understanding (CLU) integration with Power Virtual Agents, developers can bring their own custom language models to their bots allowing builders to go beyond Power Virtual Agents out of the box natural language model and build or reuse CLU models they have trained previously. This integration allows developers to create and map CLU intents and entities to Power Virtual Agents topics and be used alongside Power Virtual Agents prebuilt entities for all supported languages, with support of dialogue triggering, interruptions, “did you mean” and slot filling.

 

Power Virtual Agents: Generative Answers – New enhancements (public preview)

Power Virtual Agents generative answers capabilities (Also known as conversation boosters) expands to include multiple knowledge sources – external sites, documents, internal Sharepoint sites, or a combination of these – and instantly have rich, multi-turn conversations over that knowledge, available in Public Preview. This also includes a new generative answers node which allows more granular use of generative answers by topic, vs all up fallback. If you have an Azure OpenAI Service instance for your company data, you can hook it up for PVA to use with a few clicks, allowing your bots full access to those capabilities. Invite customers to try out generative answers now with a simple demo bot (aka.ms/pvademo) - just add in your company website and start chatting.

 

Power Automate: Actions SDK (public preview)

Now developers can build, use, and manage custom actions in Power Automate for desktop through a publicly available SDK. The actions SDK will help organizations accelerate development by allowing a repository of custom actions that can integrate to homegrown applications and common workflows. To learn more, visit https://aka.ms/Build2023/PowerAutomate/ActionsSDK-Docs

 

Power Automate: Copilot (public preview)

Alongside a new cloud flow designer is the public preview of Copilot in Power Automate. Building off the foundations of the describe it to design it feature which uses natural language to accelerate creation of automation, these two unified experiences enable developers to work smarter – not harder – with the power of AI. To learn more, visit https://aka.ms/Build2023/PowerAutomate/Copilot-Docs

 

Power Automate: Work queues (public preview)

Work queues are an essential part of digital workforce management, which involves managing and optimizing the use of digital workers, such as software robots, and distributing prioritized work effectively across automations and available resources. Work queues help prioritize work items, with the highest-priority items being completed first, regardless of whether they're processed by digital workers, human workers, or through integrations. To learn more, visit https://aka.ms/Build2023/PowerAutomate/WorkQueues-Docs.

 

Power Automate: Hosted machines (generally available)

Earlier this year we announced the preview of hosted machines and general availability of hosted machine groups with the hosted RPA add-on for Power Automate. Now, hosted machines is generally available. This groundbreaking approach to running RPA bots at scale takes the weight off IT for setting up and managing virtual machines by letting Microsoft do the work for you with hosted infrastructure. To learn more, visit https://aka.ms/Build2023/PowerAutomate/HostedMachines-Docs

 

Power Apps: Copilot enhancements

Copilot in Power Apps can now build complex multi-screen apps and turn unstructured inputs into structured data. These advancements include the ability to use Copilot to add and edit any screen or mainline control to an app; the ability to understand unstructured Excel files as inputs and turn them into structured data; and the ability for developers to add an advanced Copilot control to model apps for end users that can reason over all the data in their application. While makers have already seen the power of Copilot in creating and editing tables, this new iteration can interpret unstructured data and create complex multi-screen applications through the power of natural language.

 

Dataverse: Excel to App

Excel to App enables citizen developers to build an app on their Excel data, by dragging and dropping or copying a link to their Excel spreadsheet into Dataverse. From there, Copilot in Power Apps generates a Dataverse table for makers and a Canvas app on top of their data, which makers can immediately start to customize.

 

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